Apply external rate for shipping on BigCommerce

Question

Currently BigCommerce has companies like FedEx to calculate shipping rates for products, and our client has requested us to use an external transportation service which is not on BigCommerce by default: Aramex.

Aramex have their own API and I need to get customer details and product details from BigCommerce, so that I can send them to the Aramex API for rate calculation. Then I need to display this rate, which is to be part of the whole price when the final amount is displayed.

What is the best way to do this? Should I use a custom checkout? In general, how does one get this data when a client is checking out?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, accomplishing this with a third-party platform like BigCommerce is near impossible unless they specifically build code for you to input custom shipping costs.

You could use AJAX to display the shipping rate on the page without any issues, but there is no way to apply that rate to the order or save it to the database at this time. (You could save it as a custom field or in notes though).

I tried BigCommerce among many other platforms and decided to go the custom route due to similar problems.